Baselworld is only a few weeks away. Getting the latest news is easy, Click Here for info on how to join the Watchuseek.com newsletter list. Follow our team for updates featuring event coverage, new product unveilings, watch industry news & more!

AMD was founded in 1969 as a manufacturer of integrate circuits. AMD produced clones of Intel processors from 1975 to 1995. But with reverse-engineered clones, AMD was always behind Intel in x86 evolution and the introduction of the 5th generation x86 processor Pentium (released in 1993) threatened to widen the gap. AMD (and Cyrix, NexGen) began working on a processor that was x86-compatible but whose internal designs were independent.

The "K" stands for Kryptonite or Krypton (Intel = Superman). The project started in 1992 as AMD's top priority. The processor was released belatedly in 1996, over a year later than the original plan. The K5 was technically better than the Pentium with larger primary caches, a better superscalar design (more execution units), with modern features such as out-of-execution and a RISC-like core. However the K5 did not succeed commercially because it was released just too late and it had several problems (low clock rates, poor performance in several applications).

The K6 processor was introduced in 1997. Despite the name implying a design evolving from the K5, the K6 is a totally different design that was created by the NexGen team (and in particular Vinod Dham, the father of the Pentium) and adapted after the acquisition of NexGen by AMD in 1996. The processor has a powerful six issue RISC core including Multimedia Unit with Intel's new MMX supported. It became the first processor to truly challenge Intel's dominance since the launch of the Pentium and allowed AMD to recover after problems with the K5 processors. The first iteration AMD-K6 gained the performance crown before the release of the Pentium II. The second iteration AMD-K6-2 and the third AMD-L6-III competed very well against Pentium II, Celeron, and Pentium III. Overall the K6 (in particular K6-2) became very popular and dominated the retail PC market.

Work on AMD's 7th generation x86 processor, known as K7, started in 1995 with the mission of beating Intel's next generation CPU. The K7 was built from scratch by the design team led by Dirk Meyer (a leading engineer of the DEC Alpha, now the president of AMD). It was given a new name Athlon (derived from the word "decathlon"), and released in June 1999. It featured better and larger functional units (a fully-pipelined FPU, 3 fully-pipelined IEU, 3 fully-pipelined AGU), implying a larger die size, deep pipelines (so a higher clock speed), superior instruction decoder and control unit, the EV6 DDR point-to-point bus architecture (vs. Intel's GTL+ shared bus), that also meant the Athlon needed its own chipset (first AMD 750, then VIA, ALi, SiS) unlike K5 and K6. The Athlon processor family surpassed Intel in every way and became an enormous success.

Thorton, first released September 2003, the same core as Barton but half the L2 Cache disabled, 1667–2200MHz (2000+ to 3100+), FSB 266/333/400MT/s, 130 nm process

There were also Athlon MP (supporting multiprocessor for workstation/server), Athlon XP-M (mobile Athlon XP featuring PowerNow!), Duron (reduced 64KB L2 Cache, based on the Thunderbird/Palomino/Thoroughbred cores) and the first generation Sempron (based on the Thoroughbred/Thorton/Barton cores).

The K8 processor (codenamed Hammer) is the eighth (current) generation of AMD's x86 processor. The core design evolved from the K7 with a few changes or improvements. The major difference is the ability of 64-bit computing, called the x86-64 technology (or AMD64 for the AMD platform, and EM64T for the Intel platform as Intel adopted the technology later). There had been several microprocessors with 64-bit computing. The only 64-bit processor with x86 32-bit compatibility at that time was Intel's Itanium, but that ran x86 32-bit applications only with significant speed degradation. AMD64 gained recognition because of its ability to run 32-bit application without speed penalties as well as 64-bit applications. Other features are an on-die memory controller and the implementation of an extremely high performance point to point bus architecture called HyperTransport.

The first of the AMD64 processors was the server processor Opteron (Socket 940) released in April 22, 2003. Then the desktop processors Athlon 64 (Socket 754; restricted to a single-channel memory controller) and Athlon 64 FX (Socket 940; marketed to hardware enthusiasts) were released on September 23, 2003. The Athlon 64 with Socket 939 (supports a dual-channel memory controller) was released on June 1, 2004. The on-die memory controller was designed from the ground up to be able to support multiple cores and, after manufacturing processes matured, the first dual-core Opteron was released on April 21, 2005 and the dual-core desktop Athlon 64 X2 followed. The K8 cores first supported DDR, then migrated to DDR2 with the new Socket AM2 (desktop), Socket F (1207) (server) and Socket S1 (mobile) since May 23, 2006. A low-end processor family was branded Sempron (the same name as the last low-end Socket A processor family, but with entirely new cores). In the Athlon 64 FX family, the AMD Quad FX platform was introduced in November 2006, that features two dual-core processors with upgradability to two quad-core processors in future. The manufacturing process was 130 nm, then 90 nm (the Winchester core and all the subsequent cores) and currently 65 nm (the Brisbane core).

All the processors in the K8 family except a few low-end Sempron models support all of MMX, SSE, SSE2, Enhanced 3DNow!, NX bit, AMD64 and Cool'n'Quiet (PowerNow!). The support for SSE3 was added later (since the Venice core). The support for AMD Virtualization was added to Socket AM2, Socket F (1207), and Socket S1 processors.

Palermo (D0/E3/E6), first released on April 15, 2005, based on the Winchester/Venice core, 128KB or 256KB L2 Cache, 62W, some CPU technologies disabled

Sempron 2500+: 1.4GHz, 256KB L2

Sempron 2600+: 1.6GHz, 128KB L2

Sempron 2800+: 1.6GHz, 256KB L2

Sempron 3000+: 1.8GHz, 128KB L2

Sempron 3100+: 1.8GHz, 256KB L2

Sempron 3300+: 2.0GHz, 128KB L2

Sempron 3400+: 2.0GHz, 256KB L2

Socket 940

Socket 940 was designed for the server platform, supporting a dual-channel memory controller but accepting only registered memory. AMD originally planned only a single-channel desktop processor. OEMs/enthusiasts demanded a dual-channel solution for the ultra high-end desktop part. Thus AMD simply took their existing dual-channel design (Opteron, Socket 940) and rebranded it as a desktop processor. The main drawbacks were that it required registered memory and there was no upgrade path.

Socket 939 was introduced in June 2004 as a replacement of Socket 754 and Athlon 64 FX Socket 940. It supports a dual-channel unbuffered memory controller and has a single HyperTransport 2.0 (1000MHz) link.

The AMD Quad FX platform is a dual-socket, multi-core PC platform consisting of two Socket F (1207) called Socket F (1207 FX) (also called Socket L1) and a pair of Athlon 64 FX processors (identified as Opteron by CPU-Z). Socket F (1207) is used instead of AM2 to support three HyperTransport links for multiprocessors. However Quad FX accepts only unbuffered memory. It is reported that Opteron 2200-series processors (Santa Rosa) work with the Quad FX platform without problems (DailyTech – AMD Opteron 2200-series Works in Quad FX Motherboards).

The FASN8 (First AMD Silicon Next-gen 8-core Platform) is a dual-socket, octa-core PC platform consisting of two Socket F (1207) called Socket F (1207 FX) (also called Socket L1) and a pair of Phenom FX processors. Socket F (1207) is used instead of AM2+ to support three HyperTransport links for multiprocessors. The AMD RD790 chipset will support this platform with DSDC (Dual Socket Direct Connect). Since it also supports 4 PCI Express x16 graphics cards, the platform also called 8x4 (8 CPU cores and 4 GPU cores).

Griffin is the codename of the first processor family from AMD solely for the mobile platform, based on the K8 processor with some specific architectural enhancements aimed at lower power consumption. The Griffin processor was released as part of the Puma mobile platform on June 4th, 2008. Some key features are: